Search results

Over the last several decades, businesses have faced mounting pressures from diverse stakeholders to alter their corporate operations to become more socially and environmentally responsible. In turn, many firms appear to have responded by implementing more sustainable practices — measuring, documenting, and publishing annual CSR or sustainability reports to showcase how they are addressing important issues in this area, including: resource stewardship, waste management, greenhouse gas emission reductions, fair and safe labor practices, amongst other stakeholder concerns. And yet, research in this domain has not yet systematically examined whether businesses have, on the whole, changed their practices in tandem with the important changes in its institutional context over time. Have corporate CSR initiatives, in fact, been growing over the last 25 years or has the increased attention to CSR actually been much ado about nothing? In this chapter, we review the empirical literature on CSR to uncover that common measures of CSR such as the KLD do not support the concept that CSR practices have increased substantively over the last 25 years. We supplement this historical review by modeling the growth curves of CSR implementation in practice and find that the pace of positive change has indeed been glacial. More alarmingly, we also look at corporate social irresponsibility (CSiR) and find that, contrary to expectations, businesses have become more, not less, irresponsible during this same time period. Implications of these findings for theory are presented as are suggestions for future research in this domain.

This chapter reviews the origins and primary arguments of resource dependence theory and traces its influence on the subsequent literatures in multiple social science and professional disciplines, contrasting it with Emerson's power-dependence theory. Recent years have seen an upsurge in the theory's citations in the literature, which we attribute in part to Stanford's position of power in the network of academic exchange. We conclude with a review of some promising lines of recent research that extend and qualify resource dependence theory's insights, and outline potentially fruitful areas of future research.

Directors’ human capital has long been recognised as vital to ensuring effective corporate governance. While previous studies have sought to link director human capital with specific firm-level outcomes, there are persistent challenges facing researchers who seek to understand better what kind of human capital makes a difference to effective board role execution. This study aims to understand whether the way directors fulfil their roles and contribute to boardroom dynamics is shaped by any human capital they gain via senior executive experience.

We draw insights from 30 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with Indian directors to capture their perceptions and experiences of how a specific kind of human capital, namely the C-suite experience, affects directors' boardroom dynamics and board role execution.

We highlight how directors with executive experience appear to have a more salient set of human capital to draw on. Specifically, they report navigating governance processes differently, displaying a more contextualised understanding of boardroom dynamics and having a broader understanding of the firm’s problems. Doing so enables them to foster constructive board-management relationships and improve their service role execution.

Our qualitative data are drawn from a purposively sampled group in a specific governance system (India). While this does not threaten the key theoretical insights, it does raise questions about their generalisability to other governance contexts.

Directors with executive experience build trust through their orientation towards and understanding of management without diminishing their capacity to scrutinise management decisions. The human capital of these directors appears to engender a more effective and contextualised boardroom dynamic that facilitates the execution of socialised accountability through balancing the control and service roles.

Our findings highlight the potential importance of a shared understanding of the communication and collaboration processes of corporate governance (i.e. a common transactional memory framework) between directors and management. Directors who share this understanding with management are more likely to effectively engage in the service role while not compromising the control role. This shared understanding appears to allow these directors and executives to encode, store and retrieve relevant information they need more effectively, engendering the trust between them that seems to foster socialised accountability.

The aim of our study is to explore the nexus between the gender composition of board and firm financial performance. We use the data of 114 listed banks from 10 Asian emerging economies. Data were extracted from the DataStream for the year 2012–2021. We apply fixed effect model to analyze the data. In addition, we use generalized method of moments (GMM) to verify our main findings. We find that both proxies of board gender composition which are the proportion of female board members and the percentage of female executives on the board have a significant impact on banks' financial performance. Findings suggest that female representation on board provides more insights of monitoring and optimal advisory capabilities and, therefore, gender-diversified board enhances firm performance. Females are more active in business matters and take more interests to fulfill their responsibilities. The results of our study provide useful signals for corporate and regulatory policymakers. Board gender disparities between enterprises should be better understood by all stakeholders to have the optimal combination of board members that ultimately lead to better performance of the firm.

In this chapter, we overview different neuroenhancement techniques that could be applied for accelerating the learning process in a number of tasks that are associated with occupational roles. The techniques range from: (1) pharmaceutical and invasive methods with limited applicability to the healthy population, due to possible side effects and obtrusiveness; (2) game-based brain training that shows task-specific potential, but may not generalize; and (3) a promising new research direction in which the goal is to “train” the brain to reach an optimal cognitive state for performing a given task, and remain in this state by self-regulation. However, in order to accomplish this goal of brain training, the neurological markers that best discriminate good task performance need to be identified. We also review a number of initial studies in this chapter which have analyzed such markers in a variety of training-related applications for different occupations, such as military/security (e.g., marksmanship, deadly force judgment and decision making, submarine piloting and navigation, phishing detection), medicine (e.g., robot-assisted surgery), banking (e.g., financial traders), sports (e.g., golf, archery, and baseball), or entertainment (e.g., musicians and actors). The promising results of these early studies are fueling interest in neuroscience-based technology and methods in the rapidly developing field of organizational neuroscience (e.g., leadership research). We conclude the chapter with a discussion of future research directions.

Although resource dependence theory (RDT) has substantially deepened the understanding of the function and role of boards, no systematic review of this body of work has yet been undertaken. The purpose of this paper is to synthesize prior research on the strategically relevant resources provided by board members to their organization in the light of RDT and indicate avenues for future research.

The review covers 79 research articles from 1978 to 2016 dealing with the resource provision of boards of directors.

Board capital research most often assumes a positive, linear relationship between board capital, resource provision and ultimately firm-level performance outcomes. This tendency tends to exclude from view the possibility of important trade-offs relevant to both theory and practice. Future research will need to incorporate more complex models that take into consideration nonlinear and curvilinear effects. The authors outline opportunities to advance board research by refining the methodological techniques employed.

By recommending investigation of the important trade-offs inherent in board composition, the authors seek to inspire future research that offers practical guidance for improving the effectiveness of corporate boards.

This research applies a quasi-experimental research method to investigate the impact of an innovative resource titled “Accounting Exercise” (teaching intervention using physical movement and lyrics) on learning motivation and performance on a group of students enrolled in a first-year undergraduate accounting course in Japan.

Five classes were randomly assigned to either an experimental group (two classes) or a control group (three classes). In the experimental group, 90 students participated in a 15-min “Accounting Exercise” at the commencement of lectures over three consecutive weeks. The remaining 133 students assigned to the control group did not participate in the Accounting Exercise.

The findings indicate that the Accounting Exercise provided stimuli in maintaining students’ learning motivation. This finding is important for entry-level students where learning motivation has the potential to influence students’ future decisions on major areas of study and career choices.

This finding is important for entry-level students where future career options are decided. This effect is also believed to contribute to reducing the declining numbers of students in accounting majors.

Personal political connections with politicians have positive contribution to the abnormal returns of firms (Hillman, Zardkoohi, & Bierman, 1999; Chung, 2006; Dinc, 2005; Faccio, 2006; Morck, Wolfenzon, & Yeung, 2005; Imai, 2006). Business owners and executives have incentives to invest in political connections because such relationship may enable their firms to gain access to key information not available to the competitors. However, the impact of political connections on the behaviors of firms has only received scant interest in the literature (Hillman, Withers, & Collins, 2009).

The objective of this research is to examine the impact of formal and informal political connections on the scope of family business diversification. We focus on family business because of their unique access to family ties or family social capital to achieve business objectives (Sharma, 2004; Steier, 2003). We test our hypotheses using panel data from 35 Taiwan-based family business groups from 1988 to 2002. Our analysis shows that the informal political connections possessed by the parent generation owners of family business groups are better predictors of family business diversification than the informal political connections established by the children generations owners. This result complements the resource dependence theory by suggesting that durable and non-transferable political connections possessed by family leaders have a unique effect in the corporate decision to diversify. Additionally, the personal ties between politicians and parent generation family leaders are “sticky.” They cannot be easily succeeded by the younger generations.

Representation of women on boards is getting more and more attention these recent years (Hillman, Shropshire, & Cannella, 2007; Nielsen & Huse, 2010), all the more as recent influence by the legislator accelerates the pace of change. Indeed, in France, a new law adopted in January 2011 stated that the proportion of female directors should not be lower than 40% in all major companies.

Most previous research focused on the impact of the presence of women in boards on performance, but there are few studies on female directors' networks. In order to help to better understand the ties at the origin of these networks, we study several characteristics and network ties of female directors of French companies belonging to the SBF 120 index and we compare them with male characteristics. We test the specificity of four types of board of directors' networks: attendance at the same elite educational institutions, use of business networks, civil servants' networks, and interlocking directorates.

Our findings suggest that female directors' networks tend to find their origin in business networks more than men. Conversely, male directors have more board interlocking and are more often graduated from elite schools than women. These results show that female directors' networks have specific origins in comparison with men's ones. The exploration of this specificity could be an asset to better understand the role and influence of female directors' networks in governance.